Building Success
As teachers, we certainly do not have all the answers when it comes to facilitating the kind of success in students that we want and expect. However, we do think that we have adopted many principles that can lead to success when applied consistently, both at school and at home. The purpose of this page is to share those principles that we have learned and tried, to the best of our abilities, to reinforce in our classrooms.
Success = Effort + Setback + Retry
We believe that effort, perseverance, and resilience are keys to success in fifth grade and beyond. When success comes easily, students may disengage from learning and receive the unproductive message that all things are easy. We want students to experience success through independent mastery, determination, and persistence. These qualities are cultivated by challenging them with tasks that require effort to meet high expectations. This sets kids up for future success.
Students will likely experience setback and struggle, but that is where the real learning occurs! Through this process, students learn to persevere and overcome obstacles (resilience), ultimately empowering them as learners. Cultivating these qualities now will ensure students' sense of competence and will build self-confidence in their own abilities well into the future. Please see this article for more details: Raise Inspired Kids.
As adults (teachers and parents), we must take great care to allow kids to feel the discomfort that comes with disappointment and failure. With our best intentions, we sometimes opt for immediate happiness in the hopes of preserving "self-esteem." However, true happiness, confidence, and higher self-esteem are actually derived from our sense of competence - our ability to accept a challenge, take risks, solve problems, bounce back from difficulty, and ultimately prevail. THAT is where happiness comes from!
Got Grit?
Of course, the underlying concept behind the effort/setback/retry success formula is resilience, or grit. We strongly believe that kids need to learn how to handle adversity, and not be shielded from it. In his book called How Children Succeed - Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, Paul Tough argues that the qualities that matter most for success have to do with character, not intelligence or test scores. These characteristics include perseverance, curiosity, conscientiousness, optimism, and self-control. Tough writes that adults need to remember that we are not really raising kids; we are raising future adults. These are adults who will need to be able to take risks, to be creative and innovative, and to solve serious problems.
Other books we have read and resources on this topic include:
A Nation of Wimps - The High Cost of Invasive Parenting by Hara Estroff Marano
Outliers - The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
Under Pressure by Carl Honore
Building Resilience in Children and Teens: Giving Kids Roots and Wings by Kenneth Ginsburg
Optimism & Mindset
To successfully deal with adversity and failure, kids need to have resilience. But, they also need to believe that it is possible to bounce back and actually achieve success. Two other books we have read recently cover this side of the issue very well.
In The Optimistic Child: A Proven Program to Safeguard Children Against Depression and Build Lifelong Resilience, author Martin E. P. Seligman suggests that depression is a serious problem that prevents success in many children. He describes a detailed program for instilling a greater sense of optimism and personal mastery. Seligman argues that self-esteem comes from mastering challenges, overcoming frustration and experiencing individual achievement. We have learned a great deal from this book and we intend to try some of the strategies Seligman offers to increase optimism in our classrooms.
In Carol Dweck's book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, she describes how our abilities and talents are not the reasons for success; it is our mindset. The book contrasts two mindsets that can affect success. The fixed mindset believes that intelligence is fixed. No amount of learning, effort, or experience will change the level of intelligence we have. A growth mindset believes that intelligence can be grown through challenge, hard work, and overcoming obstacles. For kids, mindset is learned and reinforced by parents and teachers either through words we use, or by our own modeling. However, and most importantly, our words cannot consist of empty praise of the person ("you're so smart!"), but needs to consist of genuine expression of praise of the effort given ("I love how hard you worked!").
We've learned a great deal from this book because it has direct implications for teachers. Mindset is not just an individual belief; it can exist in the atmosphere and culture of a classroom. As such, the teacher and classroom mindsets can have a powerful affect on students' mindsets. We have personal goals of creating and cultivating a growth mindset for ourselves and our classrooms...with the hope of doing the same for our students. We want them to feel that through effort, determination, and resilience in the face of hardship, they can achieve anything.
